Reflection

 

This course was unlike my other classes this semester. Being freshman means doing mostly information-based work and not having a lot of freedom to do more creative work. This course let me choose topics I wanted and create content based on research I had done on the topic. I will outline and elaborate upon what I have done in this course.

            The core assignments are the three projects. The first one was an investigative field study with a two-thousand-word limit. I had to do research for this project. While I could use different types of sources, including primary sources (i.e., original research), I chose to use secondary sources with a mix of academic and popular sources. This was a practical decision. I did have the time, resources, or expertise to conduct my own research on the topic, so I was limited to existing research. The second project was a rhetorical analysis of two artefacts, one a text-based scholarly source and the second of any genre and medium. I used a research study I had used for project one as my scholarly source and an infographic as my second source. The rhetorical analysis did not involve research on my part, instead I was tasked with identifying, breaking down, and explaining the rhetorical elements of the artefacts I had chosen. This proved to be an easier assignment than I had expected. I found little difficultly identifying a few different rhetorical elements and then providing an explanation of their function and purpose for the authors’ arguments. The third project was to create three short compositions in three different genres on similar topics and to then do a short rhetorical analysis of each. This assignment was the most fun as the different genre pieces were fun to write and the analysis was simpler than project two because it was easier to identify and explain my own rhetorical elements than those of others.

            I had done work similar to the projects for this course. The investigative field essay was like the two-thousand-word essay I had to write for Global Perspectives in high school. I found it easier this time around as I had written a few papers of this length and had more knowledge in my chosen field to craft a research question and build my essay. The original composition part of project three was similar to the assignments I did in AICE English. In that course we would be given a topic and sample of work on the topic and tasked with creating a composition in another genre about the given topic. We had to continue story excerpts and write our own versions of short stories. The work I did for that greatly contributed to what I did for project three. Project two and the rhetorical analysis of project three was like analysis work I did in English, Global Perspectives, as well as my social sciences and history courses. In totality, this course covered material and tasks that I had spread over several courses in high school.

            Because I am an economics major much of the work I will be doing as I continue my academic and professional careers will be centered on reading research, analyzing research, creating reports, and possibly even conducting my own original research. While the skills I have picked up and honed here are not the end of my development as a critical reader and a writer, it will provide a strong base for me to build off of in the future.